An Invitation

Did you know that BostonCHI has been in continuous operation for over 35 years? The past few years have been markedly different from all the rest, with the move from gathering in person, to gathering online. And now, it’s time to change again.

BostonCHI invites you to join us in shaping our journey ahead.

In this online workshop, we’ll run through a series of enjoyable interactive activities on a digital whiteboard, to help us answer the question: where will BostonCHI go next?

Schedule – EST (UTC-5)

6:45 – 7:00: introduction

Kick off the meeting with some light intro activities

7:00 – 7:15: the journey up to now

• Build up a collaborative journey map of BostonCHI over time
• What has worked well during the pandemic years?
• What has worked well for in-person events?

7:15 – 7:45: possible futures

Brainstorm where BostonCHI might go next, looking at topics such as:

• Future event formats
• Potential themes, topics, and speakers for next year’s talks
• Connecting and growing the community
• Member experience

7:45 – 8:00: a look inside the steering committee

• Steering themes for the year
• Operational updates; how the steering committee is organized
• Open roles and opportunities

What if you could generate excitement about delivering great user experiences without having to explain what UX is?

Imagine this: you’re talking with your development and product partners about UX outcomes and they understand the value in starting with the end-in-mind. Not only do they understand, they are excited about what will happen in your users’ and customers’ lives because you’ve delivered a great UX – together.

In this session, you’ll uncover the proven secrets behind sparking enthusiasm for delivering great UX. You’ll discover how an outcome-driven approach is a game changer for UX leaders like yourself.

You’ll explore how to:

… Identify the outcomes that best spark excitement amongst the developers, product managers, and stakeholders you work with every day.

… Scope your outcomes to push your team to take on challenges they’ve resisted in the past.

… Show what it means to be ready-to-ship through the lens of great user experiences.

Venue

This online event will be held in Zoom.

About Jared Spool

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.

In the 43 years he’s been in the tech field, Jared has worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

For 23 years, Jared was the conference chair and keynote speaker at the now retired annual UI Conferences and UX Immersion Conferences; Jared still manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is a co-author of Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.

You’ll find Jared’s writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on Twitter at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

This is a joint event of GBC/ACM, BostonCHI, and the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

Abstract:

The best digital experiences materialize when “what” users do and “why” they do it are both well understood. For the last decade, however, quantitative analytics and qualitative experience testing have been largely distinct work streams, with separate tools and stakeholders. In this talk, I’ll present recent work from academia and industry that demonstrates how data-driven technologies can bridge the qualitative/quantitative gap, supporting richer UX analysis workflows and increasing speed to insight.

Bio:

Ranjitha Kumar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Chief Research Scientist at UserTesting. Her research has won best paper awards/nominations at premier conferences in human-computer interaction, and is supported by grants from the NSF, Google, Amazon, and Adobe. She received her BS and PhD from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and co-founded Apropose, Inc., a data-driven design startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates.

Schedule – EST (UTC-5)

6:45 – 7:00: Virtual Networking

7:00 – 8:00: Presentation

8:00 – 8:30: Q & A